Thursday, November 05, 2015

Verdict: Off screen sounds and close ups create a world of paranoia
and inversion. The real narrative (collateral) of the 1980s Punjab is home
invasion.

Genre: Drama, Thriller

Mr. Singh’s
backgrounds here are hazy and out-of-focus. He isolates people within spaces,
and between the lighting and framing – of medium shots of a group of cops
talking at a railway station, or two guys waiting for a train – he seems to
provide the same sort of demarcation between light and darkness, between
security and insecurity that the old television serials on Doordarshan would
do. He doesn’t give us any establishing shot of the railway station itself, of a
continuous space so to speak, almost limiting the breathing space available
around to a bare minimum. There are several shots through a door towards the
outside ala The Searchers, and while
Mr. Ford’s shots felt like a view from a telescope with considerable amount of
breathing space for they had depth of view that was aided very well with the
nature of the geography – the details of terrain – Mr. Singh’s lack depth and
the monochrome green of the crops provide for a lack of detail that seems to
essentially open up the house like one were to open a cardboard box. The house
here feels flat, like two parallel lines pretty close by with seeming danger
beyond the foreground and unknown in the background. I admit, I have never been
to any rural place in any part of India, and I also feel that Mr. Singh’s Chauthi Koot is, in its form in its
concerns and thereby in its very essence, a home invasion film.

There is another enclosed box in
the form of the ticket collector’s compartment tagging along with the rest of
the train at its rear end, and it has a window through which we see the passing
tracks on which the train is running. There are people sitting inside that box,
after having sneaked/pushed their way in in spite of the ticket collector’s rejecting
their earlier requests to let them travel, and Mr. Singh cuts this group – of two
friends, a Sardarji whom the friends meet on the station, of two guys
travelling from before – into little pockets. And on the off occasion he does bring
them together, the grouping is so tight it lacks air. Earlier, we see those two
friends, Jugal (Mr. Kanwaljit Singh) and Raj (Mr. Aulakh), walking and then running
towards the station in a series of tight frames, and all of it creates a
significant distrust for the space around. One of those friends happens to
provide the essential service of framing the primary story of Joginder (Mr.
Suvinder Vicky), the patriarch of a home seemingly in the middle of nowhere and
with a fierce dog for a pet. It is a home that was built to be near the farms,
a motivation I presume driven towards reassurance. But it is Punjab in 1980s
and Khalsa members would be moving in the night to escape the cops and the
army. They are not to be trifled with, and between the close-ups of Joginder’s
fuming eyes and the off-screen barking of the dog, where one wishes it forget
its barking duties from time to time and not bother the travelling Khalsa
members, the controllable space (if home can be defined thus) seems to be
shrinking all the time. There’re the cops too, and when they run through the
house tearing it apart looking for god-knows-what you realize Mr. Singh, has
inverted the overall dynamic of what constitutes domestic security. Every time
the dog barks the walls seem to become that wee bit thinner. There is an
off-screen sound of a bullet too, just as there is the off-screen BBC radio
report on Operation Blue Star. And amidst all this, Home is no longer what it
was, and it stands there naked just like the trailer in The Hills Have Eyes. Which makes you wonder if your home is where
it belongs. Or you belong to that home in the first place. Or maybe, just
maybe, it is better to have the ideological clarity of a dog and know for sure
where your allegiances lie.